Reading

I didn't know how to read.
It was an epiphany, a thunderbolt, a mini-enlightenment: my first big one since Santa-gate. Not only was I not appreciating literature anywhere close to the level it merited, but far worse, I was effectively inoculating myself against it. I was penetrating books only to the degree necessary to cross them off my must-read list. I returned to many of the books I had read and thought of as friends, only to confirm what Adler said: these books were almost complete strangers to me. I knew them as intimately as if I'd merely read brief synopses of them years ago. I was, as Adler put it, a literate ignoramus: I had read widely, but not well.